From a previous post: "First names are almost always two syllables in Korean, and are hyphenated." - Yes and no - see below.

"One nitpick: The hyphenation thing is a Westernism and somewhat antiquated at that. None of the Chinese I know (including my wife and her relatives) use it when writing their names in Latin characters or Hanzi. Generally they just write their given name as one word."

That's true (but see below) for Chinese names, but for Korean names using or not using hyphens seems to vary. For example, on London's Korean Cultural Centre (KCC) website none of the given names of the staff have hyphens, and none are separated. But on the current front page a film director is "Bong Joon-ho" and the violinist is "Kyung Wha Chung" (surname Chung). The Korean newspaper Chosun website uses hyphened given names in its English pages, as does the Korean Film Archive (based in Seoul) database. Note that in my experience typically a hyphenated Korean given name is like this BAE Doo-na" and MOON So-ri (two rather good Korean actors): that is the second part of the given name is not capitalised.

That said, to "confirm" all this I just looked at two calling cards I have in my wallet. The Korean one (from a KCC staff member) does not have the given name hyphenated, but the card from a Chinese-American assistant professor at a major London university *does* have a hyphenated given name, with both parts of the given capitalised.

So the polite thing to do is use a name as a person themselves uses it, no matter how you or I consider it should be spelled.

• The British treatment of Turing after WW2 was shameful and stupid.
• Turning to early "computers":
• Assuming this Wikipedia article on the Z3 is correct, in 1941 the Germans built the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer, which used electromechanical relays.
• Assuming this Wikipedia article on the Colossus is correct, in 1943-44 the British built the world's first working programmable electronic digital computer, using valves (or over the Atlantic, tubes).
• Correcting the previous but one post that "The British invented computers to crack Enigma", let's try: "The British built (and maybe invented) the world's first programmable electronic digital computer to decipher the German's Lorenz Cipher, which the British called "fish". The linked article points out that German operator errors allowed the British to work out the logical structure of the cipher machine without seeing the machine itself, a "quite remarkable feat" with the initial breakthrough made by W T Tutte.
• Enigma was decrypted using Bombes which were electromechanical machines and were programmable computers, although the way they were set up had to be flexible. In 1938 the Poles had built a more specific machine Bomba to help decipher Enigma.
• The 1946 ENIAC "was similar to the Colossus [but] much faster and more flexible. It was unambiguously a Turing-complete device and could compute any problem that would fit into its memory."
• And finally(?), reading the Wikipedia article on the ENIAC we learn that the world's first completely electronic computing device was the 1942 American Atanasoff-Berry Computer, but it wasn't programmable, "being designed only to solve systems of linear equations".

• 1. "Of course they were, most men were taking bullets on the various front for them"
• Is that really true? You might be the type of man(?) this was aimed at? Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942
• "It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."
• "When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic - remember she didn't get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich"
• (For a semi-balanced opinion on this little "book", I suggest reading the review by Peasant, which explains that the original was actually seven pages of ratty typescript, that the brown cover is a modern fake, and then has thoughtful ideas on the reasons for its use in 1942.)

• USA census 1940 Continental USA population about 132 million, plus about 2 million for Alaska, Hawaii, etc.
• 26.4% aged 5-19, so about 7.0% 16-19; 38.9% 20-44, so about 23.3% 20-34; 19.8% 45-64;
• so about 30.3% aged 16-34; assuming 50% male, that's about 20 million males 16-34;
• so about 35.4% aged 35-64; assuming 50% male, that's about 23 million males 35-64.
• In splitting the 20-44 counts I'm assuming that year by year births for those ages were roughly equal; I'm also ignoring that older people have higher mortality rates than younger people, because that's not going to have a major effect on rough calculations for these ages.
• The total serving in US army, navy, marines, coast guard were 1.8 million in 1941 rising to 12.2 million in 1945, or a (possibly misleading) yearly average of about 7.7 million.
• You also need to understand that a large number of those serving would have been in logistics and other support, a necessary requirement of modern war which Churchill seemed not to understand fully - he periodically complained about how many serving personnel in British and Commonwealth and Empire forces in the Middle East were not actually fighting.
• So from those numbers I suggest that "most" USA men were never anywhere near a front In World War 2. I'm not casting aspersions on their courage - I'm merely pointing out that in World War 2 most USA adult males were, like almost all USA adult females, considered not suitable for fighting and/or more useful in manufacturing, etc.

• 2. "There wasn't much women on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day"
• True. However, about 15% to 20% of the French Resistance were woman, and resisting the Nazis wasn't exactly safe. I would be surprised if the percentages in, for example, Belgium and Holland, were not similar. And that's before we consider the Soviet women who fought as soldiers, partisans, in tanks, and in aircraft (bombers and fighters):
• Night_Witches
• Soviet_women_in_World_War_II
• Women_in_the_Russian_and_Soviet_military
• Manshuk_Mametova
• Nina_Lobkovskaya
• Lyudmila_Pavlichenko

• 3. And all that's before we even get into the subject of how many men in *any* army actually fight.
• Britains leading war historian tackles WW2 myths
• Ignoring typical "Daily Mail" hyperbole that Anthony Beevor is Britain's leading war historian (he's good, but I'm not at all sure he's that good), he makes some good points:
• ... And if one studies the performance of average, as opposed to elite troops, the evidence indicates that only a small proportion of front-line forces, whether British, American or German, truly engaged in combat.

  An initial study in the British Army was carried out in Italy by Major Lionel Wigram. Wigram estimated that in most platoons only a small handful of men really did the fighting.

  Another small group of men were likely to run away at the first opportunity.

  Those in the main group in between would follow the fighters, if things went well, or the potential deserters if they went badly. General Montgomery was so horrified by the report that he had it suppressed.

  Yet other armies were no different, it turned out. The Germans divided their soldiers' combat performance into four categories, which were essentially the same as Wigram's breakdown except that they split the main group in the middle in two.

  And American studies came up with similar results, showing that most enlisted men seldom fired their rifles in combat.

  The Red Army found that most of its conscript soldiers were no different. Soviet officers argued during the war that a weapons inspection should be carried out immediately after an engagement with the enemy. All those found to have clean barrels should be executed immediately as 'deserters'. ...

Yes - I'm looking at the article in the print edition of New Scientist 6.December.2014. Tracking a scientist quoted in the article leads to this Scientific Americam blog - snailfish surprise in the kermadec Trench:

Partway into the collection of one-minute video clips, however, a snailfish could be seen doing something it had never been seen to do before: swim up. In an instant, the conception of the snailfish as a purely benthic species was rewritten. This is puzzling because theoretically fish shouldn’t be able to survive deeper than about 8,500 meters , and if they can swim up in the water column they might just decide to migrate deeper at some point to take advantage of the food and habitat down there. But at some point beyond that depth the difference in osmotic pressure between fish cells and seawater flips, meaning that the cellular physiology in fish would have to change in order to expel water rather than keep it in. Some marine fish can do this (think of salmon returning from the ocean to spawn), but they take time for their physiology to reboot and they have evolved the mechanism to do so.

which is what the summary could have said

  Stephanie Wehne

Stephanie Wehner is a physicist and computer scientist at QuTech, Delft University of Technology ... She studied at the University of Amsterdam and obtained her Ph.D. at CWI, before moving to Caltech as a postdoctoral researcher ... From 2014, she is an associate professor at QuTech, Delft University of Technology. Together with Jonathan Oppenheim she discovered that the amount of non-locality in quantum mechanics is limited by the uncertainty principle. She is also known for introducing the noisy-storage model in quantum cryptography. Before academia Wehner was involved in computer security, for example kernel rootkits, and for a while worked as a professional hacker.

"And vice versa: relativity is good when you consider stars, useless when you consider particles"

Why isn't the Dirac Equation a counter-example to that statement?

Truman did say "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen", but the sign on his desk was "The buck stops here" which might or might not be appropriate for these cases. It would be interesting to know what Truman would have said about this - he didn't mince his words, for example: "I fired him [General MacArthur] because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."

That post, especially the first three lines:
Astronomer A: "Do you see anything in the telescope eyepiece?"
Astronomer B: "Nope. Nothing."
Astronomer A: "Yaaay! That means WE discovered Dark Matter!"
could almost have come from a 1950s British radio comedy series "The Goon Show", which might - or might not - mean anything on the western side of the Atlantic: Wikipedia says NBC broadcasted it from the mid-1950s, and that it exercised a considerable influence on the subsequent development of British and American comedy and popular culture, for example the Beatles, Monty Python, and the American comedy team The Firesign Theatre. An example of the writing is the piece of paper" sketch.

Adding to towermac's "No, that's what happened", that's also my recollection from past reading of several books on British Intelligence in WW2. For now I can't find direct references to confirm that, so instead these sources.

http://www.robomod.net/pipermail/soc-history-war-world-war-ii/2006-January/000421.html
"when BP first broke into naval Enigma in mid-1941, the Admiralty took immediate advantage by sinking _all_ the supply ships for surface raiders that were in the Atlantic. (This was at or just after the cruise of BISMARCK.) This clean sweep alarmed the Germans significantly."

The round up of the supply ships was done in June 1941: 3 June Belchen, 4 June Esso Hamburg, 4 June Gonzenheim, 5 June Egerland, 15 June Lothringen

The information came from U110 and the inevitable other sources. The plan was to deliberately leave some of the ships alone, sink or capture enough to disrupt the network but no "perfect score" so several ships were to be left alone. Unfortunately for the planners at least one sinking was simply pure chance, the ships found each other. Thereby creating more alarm in Germany than the planners wanted.

[That reminds me of Peter Fleming (yes, the brother of Ian) - he was a head of British deception operations in South East Asia and said something to the effect that before you tell the enemy a lie, you need to know what the truth really is.]

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.history.war.world-war-ii/lK9Bw0ZptJU
... In the Med in 1941-1942, ULTRA allowed the British to intercept a very high proportion of the Axis supply ships going to North Africa. If the British had simply flown straight out to the target each each time, even the Germans would have realized they "knew something". Certainly it would have become obvious to the British sailors and airmen, and there were Axis agents in Egypt who would have relayed this fact. Therefore the British air and naval commanders in the Med made sure that no Axis ship was attacked until it had been 'spotted' by an Allied air patrol, and for each patrol sent to a known target, two others were sent out at random. ...

http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10926
... Until May 1943, the Milk Cows operated more or less at will, mainly because the North Atlantic Shark Enigma was not reliably broken until then. After that, their fates were sealed. In the next three months, another five of them had been sunk. A year later, all ten of the type XIV U-tankers had been lost. In the majority of cases (except U-464), their demise was directly attributable to their location being learned by the Allies through their signals being intercepted and decrypted. In all cases (except U-490) they were initially detected by aircraft. This was not by chance, as the aircraft were ordered to search the particular area in which they were expected. ...

You can Google for "Churchill Coventry dilemma" but make sure you read the sober articles, not the conspiracy theories. As it happens, when I just Googled the top five links all deny that Coventry was deliberately sacrificed.

For a short trustworthy account of Ultra I suggest "Top Secret Ultra" by Peter Calvocoressi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz
... while Churchill was indeed aware that a major bombing raid would take place, no one knew what the target would be.

Peter Calvocoressi was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park, which translated and analysed all deciphered Luftwaffe messages. He wrote "Ultra never mentioned Coventry... Churchill, so far from pondering whether to save Coventry or safeguard Ultra, was under the impression that the raid was to be on London."

Scientist R. V. Jones, who led the British side in the Battle of the Beams, wrote that "Enigma signals to the X-beam stations were not broken in time," and that he was unaware that Coventry was the intended target. Furthermore, a technical mistake caused jamming countermeasures to be ineffective. Jones also noted that Churchill returned to London that afternoon, which indicated that Churchill believed that London was the likely target for the raid.

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/myths/myths/he-let-coventry-burn
... What did Churchill know and when did he know it? The most succinct summary came from one of Churchill's private secretaries, John Colville, in his book, The Churchillians (London, 1981), page 62: ''All concerned with the information gleaned from the intercepted German signals were conscious that German suspicions must not be aroused for the sake of ephemeral advantages. In the case of the Coventry raid no dilemma arose, for until the German directional beam was turned on the doomed city nobody knew where the great raid would be. Certainly the Prime Minister did not. The German signals referred to a major operation with the code name "Moonlight Sonata." The usual "Boniface" secrecy in the Private Office had been lifted on this occasion and during the afternoon before the raid I wrote in my diary (kept under lock and key at 10 Downing Street), "It is obviously some major air operation, but its exact destination the Air Ministry find it difficult to determine." ''

"I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate"

A competent slide rule calculation is likely to be more accurate than an incompetent computer calculation, but given a competent user why might a slide rule be more accurate than any likely electronic computer? I've used log tables, slide rules, mechanical calculators, electronic calculators and computers, and I think even 32_bit single precision floating point arithmetic will be more accurate than a slide rule.

But I'd be delighted if someone can give a counter-example.

"I say Tommy can have human rights when he files for them, not his self-appointed human protectors."

Does that apply to humans who can't file for their own rights? For example, babies or dumb illiterates.

"But the law is pretty clear: Animals are property, not people."

If you had been living in the United States of America as little as just over 150 years ago (in other words, before 1863) you could also have written "But the law is pretty clear: some people are property".